Editing History of Tonga (section)

===The Lapita Period===
[[File:Carte lapita.png|500px|thumb|right|Region where [[Lapita]] pottery has been found]]
[[File:MegapodiusPritchardiiWolf.jpg|thumb|[[Tongan megapode]]s]]
Around 3000 B.P., the [[Lapita]] people reached Tonga, and carbon dating places their landfall first in [[Tongatapu]] and then in [[Haʻapai]] soon after.<ref name="periphery">Burley, Dickinson, Barton, & Shutler Jr., ''Lapita on the Periphery: New data on old problems in the Kingdom of Tonga''</ref> The newcomers were already well adapted to the resource-scarce island life and settled in small communities of a few households<ref name="periphery" /> on beaches just above high tide line that faced open lagoons or reefs. Through continued interaction with Lapita relatives of the west, the Haʻapaians obtained domesticated animals and cultivatable plants, but it seems that both of these possible food sources contributed minimally towards their diet for at least the first two hundred years. Instead, they feasted mainly on life in the sea: [[parrotfish]], [[wrasse]]s, [[turtle]]s, [[surgeonfish]], [[Carangidae|jacks]], [[eels]], [[emperor angelfish|emperors]], [[Benthic zone|bottom-dwellers]], [[shellfish]], and the occasional deep water [[tuna]].<ref name="kirch" /> Just as their Polynesian descendants do today.

Sea food was inexhaustible, so reefs then were not very different from reefs today, except for the marked decline in sea turtle populations. Fauna didn't fare as well, however, and soon the giant [[iguanas]], the [[megapodes]], twenty four bird species, almost all [[pigeons]], and all but one species of [[fruit bat]] were all extinct.<ref name="shutler" />

They hunted and cooked these animals with the most basic of technologies. When shell pieces were too brittle for tools, they utilized volcanic soils for “andesite/basalt used for adze manufacture and other artifacts such as oils as hammerstones, weaving weights, cooking stones, and decorative pebbles for grave decoration.”<ref name="burley">David V. Burley, Journal of World Prehistory, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1998, ''Tongan Archaeology and the Tongan Past, 2850–150 B.P.''</ref> If they were lucky, they obtained harder obsidian shards from the far northern fringe volcano of [[Tafahi]] in the [[Niuas]].<ref name="kirch" />

Another useful technology was their eponymous pottery with “dentate” impressions and simple designs that were characteristic of all [[Lapita]] settlements in the South Pacific. Tongan Lapita designs were simpler than western Lapita designs, evolving from ornate curvilinear and rectilinear patterns into simple rectilinear forms.<ref name="burley"/> The pottery was “slab-built earthenware of andesitic-tephra clay mixed with calcareous or mineral sand [[Temper (pottery)|tempers]] and fired at a low temperature.” <ref name="burley" />

Decades of archaeological excavations of ancient Lapita kitchens and middens (refuse piles) both in [[Tongatapu]] and [[Haʻapai]] have taught us much about early Tongan settlement. We know what they ate, what tools they used, where they settled (one colony each on [[‘Uiha]], [[Kauvai]], and [[Foa]], and two on [[Lifuka]]), and how large the settlements were. Despite a wealth of archaeological evidence, however, the Lapita people still stifle us with two main mysteries: How did they spread through the South Pacific so quickly, and why did the Lapita settlers in Tonga quickly abandon their ornate pottery tradition?

The Lapitan diaspora began from [[Papua New Guinea]] in 1500 BC. By 2850 BP (900 BC) they were already in [[Tonga]], meaning they virtually sprinted east for three hundred years. They travelled in small wooden boats over open ocean to invisible destinations faster than the Europeans colonizers walked across their continent.<ref name="kirch"/> Archaeologists wonder what would compel people to embark on statistically suicidal missions. It doesn't appear that population pressure was a problem, because most Lapitan islands were sparsely inhabited and could have supported much higher populations, especially if they had turned more towards available root crops.

A hypothesis from [[Patrick Vinton Kirch|Kirch]] is that Lapitan culture encouraged emigration by younger sons.<ref name="kirch"/> Not just in Tonga, but throughout the South Pacific is a tradition of passing down land to eldest sons. To obtain their own land, younger sons needed to explore. [[Tangaloa]], the chief Tongan god before the arrival of Christianity, was a younger sibling who created Tonga while searching for land from a canoe. His fish hook accidentally caught on a rock on the ocean floor and he was able to pull Tonga to the surface.

The other great mystery is why the ornate pottery tradition disappeared, and with such speed. Only two hundred years after arriving, the Lapitan settlers ceased to decorate their earthenware pots at all, and the only thing the leading contemporary Tongan archaeologist can say about the disappearance is that, “Unfortunately most explanations are based on inferential speculation, and they are difficult to validate with any degree of certainty. What we can say with confidence is that, for whatever reason pottery decoration ceased in Tonga, it did so rather suddenly.”<ref name="burley" />